{"product_id":"koba-the-dread-laughter-and-the-twenty-million-1","title":"Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million","description":"\u003cp\u003eA brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKoba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror , was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread , during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHardcover with light foxing on outer pages.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Martin Amis","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51451307622569,"sku":"9780224063036","price":9.99,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0424\/9518\/0962\/files\/images_18d3828d-bccc-4746-ba9d-a116ce9df155.jpg?v=1792804384","url":"https:\/\/roseyravelstonbooks.com.au\/products\/koba-the-dread-laughter-and-the-twenty-million-1","provider":"RoseyRavelston Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}